OctPoWriMo Day 15. The Mutating, Rondeau Cycle of Fear

OctPoWriMo Day 15. Stony Guardians

It’s easy to get used to looking at things in the same way. We spend our days sitting, standing, walking, then sitting again. It’s important to look at things from a new perspective. To lay on our backs and look up. To get up high and look down. Really look. What does the gargoyle see? What gives it the right to judge? Why does it attack?

Example Poem: “In the Pinewoods, Crows and Owl” by Mary Oliver from American Primitive

In the Pinewoods, Crows and Owl

Great bumble. Sleek
slicer. How the crows
dream of you, caught at last
in their black beaks. Dream of you
leaking your life away. Your wings
crumbling like old bark. Feathers
falling from your breast like leaves,
and your eyes two bolts
of lightning gone to sleep.
Eight of them
fly over the pinewoods looking down
into the branches. They know you are
there somewhere, fat and drowsy
from your night of rabbits and rats. One
this month you caught a crow. Scraps of him
flew far and wide, the news
rang all day through the woods. The cold
river of their hatred roils
day and night: you are their dream, their waking,
their quarry, their demon. You
are the pine god who never speaks but holds
the keys to everything while they fly
morning after morning against the shut doors. You
will have a slow life, and eat them, one by one.
They know it. They hate you. Still
when one of them spies you out, all stream
straight toward violence and confrontation.
As though it helped to see the living proof.
The bone-crushing prince of dark days, gloomy
at the interruption of his rest. Hissing
and snapping, grabbing about him, dreadful
as death’s drum; mournful unalterable fact.

~ Mary Oliver

Whose point of view is the poet exploring?

Prompt: Imagine two fears that hate each other. Take the point of view of one of them and explain why they hate the other. What will happen if these two fears meet?

Possible form: A Rondeau

~

PROLOGUE

I am the still one, embalmed in control.

You are the blur that stains the soul.

When we meet, there will be no whole.

Fear speaks five tongues, all of them mine.
Each eats the next like time devouring its own echo.

A. Fear of Silence vs Fear of Noise
Refrain: “The silence swells.”

I am the still one, embalmed in control,

You are the blur that stains the soul.

Your clang devours my fragile spells—

I shudder when your chaos knells,

Yet hush consumes your endless role.

Our hearts exchange their toll for toll,

A ghostly duet, half and whole.

Your echo builds the walls of hell;

I speak, you roar, I break, you dwell;

The tinnitus repeats its toll.

The silence swells.

No prayer will tune this aching knoll,

No peace absolve what we extol.

Your noise rebirths the void I quell;

My quiet kills the sound’s cartel;

And thus we rot to fill the hole.

The silence swells.

(pause)

Noise dies, leaving thought in its wake

and thought, when cornered, begins to eat itself.

B. Fear of Knowing vs Fear of Not Knowing

Refrain: “The thought unspools.”

I am the still one, embalmed in control,

You are the blur that stains the soul.

I crave the cut that makes mind cruel,

You hide beneath the bed of rule,

Refusing light’s dissecting toll.

You gag the truth, I probe the whole,

I map the dark, you guard the shoal.

You call my hunger epistemic fool,

I call your calm cognitive drool;

We tear each other to console.

The thought unspools.

The unknown lures, the known takes toll,

Each answer births a deeper hole.

We chase each why, yet play the ghoul;

I name, you flee; I burn, you cool;

And neither of us can stay whole.

The thought unspools.

(pause)

The mind cracks open, spilling infinity

and inside infinity, something begins to rot.

C. Fear of Death vs Fear of Living Forever

Refrain: “Eternity spoils.”

I am the still one, embalmed in control,

You are the blur that stains the soul.

I crave an end, a dark parole;

You fear decay’s eventual toll,

While I despise your endless scroll.

Your days accrue like debts unrolled,

My nights are graves of growing mold.

You pray for breath; I beg the knoll;

Each time you wake, my silence stole,

A fragment from your mortal role.

Eternity spoils.

One fears the rot, one fears control,

Both gnaw the same immortal shoal.

I envy dust, you envy coal;

I fade to peace, you pay the toll—

Still neither wins the doomed patrol.

Eternity spoils.

(pause)

The corpse twitches; not from life, but from habit.

Change creeps in, uninvited, wearing Time’s old shoes.

D. Fear of Change vs Fear of Stagnation

Refrain: “The mirror cracks.”

I am the still one, embalmed in control,

You are the blur that stains the soul.

You crave the storm that splits the knoll,

I guard the stone, the moss, the shoal;

You move, I anchor, both pay toll.

You shed your skin to claim the whole,

I clutch my past, a fossil scroll.

You laugh at walls, I curse the pole;

You bloom, I bind; you burn, I droll;

Each growth corrodes what made us whole.

The mirror cracks.

Time eats us both, a cruel patrol,

I stiffen roots, you lose control.

You chase tomorrow, I patrol

The grave of yesterday’s console—

And still the world forgets our role.

The mirror cracks.

(pause)

From the fracture leaks a strange light

and in that light, faces emerge, half-remembered, half-erased.

E. Fear of Exposure vs Fear of Disappearance

Refrain: “Name me and I fade.”

I am the still one, embalmed in control,

You are the blur that stains the soul.

You crave the gaze, the spotlight’s role;

I live beneath the floorboard’s knoll;

We orbit shame as twin patrol.

You paint my shadow bright with coal,

I hide your outline, make it whole.

You beg for eyes; I seal the bowl;

You flare; I vanish, ghost in shoal;

Yet both of us are fear’s parole.

Name me and I fade.

One dreads the dark, one dreads the scroll,

Each fears the cost of being whole.

You flash, I hush, we trade the role;

You breathe, I hush; you gleam, I stole;

And in that glimpse, both lose control.

Name me and I fade.

EPILOGUE

I am the still one, embalmed in control.

You are the blur that stains the soul.

When we meet, there will be no whole.

Each fear devours the last,

and still the voice that names them remains:

steady, unmutated, human.

~ Oizys.

[Some After-poem Notes:

Today was a long day at work, home, everything blurring at the edges but when I finally sat down and read the prompt, something in me jolted awake. The idea of two fears that hate each other triggered a domino effect in my brain. Suddenly, it wasn’t just two; it was a house full of them, all hissing through the walls, each convinced it was the real one. I found myself at a crossroads of ideas, because honestly, I am a body-house of contradictory hates, each with its own animosity toward the other. The prompt felt irresistible. So instead of choosing one pairing, I let them all speak. Each Rondeau became a room, a voice, a mutation. 

As asked by the prompt, I have noticed that Oliver writes from the crows’ collective perspective, not from the owl’s. Like Oliver’s crows circling the owl, I wrote from inside the fears themselves; as the watchers, the haunted; rather than from the safe distance of the human observer.

I let the fears themselves narrate. The point of view, then, is Fear itself. It speaks through Fear’s shifting mouths. It speaks in all its masks, each stanza a different facet of the same trembling mind. Its each voice is a facet of the same consciousness, observing, accusing, and morphing in endless self-dialogue. Its each voice is speaking as both subject and predator, aware and terrified, embodying the watcher and the watched.

Silence and noise, knowledge and ignorance, death and forever, change and stillness, exposure and erasure: each fear devouring the next until nothing remained but the act of naming. Yesterday’s prompt about mutation clearly left its remnants behind for today, shaping how these fears transformed and folded into each other. That’s why this piece became cyclical. Fear doesn’t end; it only molts. And in that mutation, maybe it becomes poetry.]